Viola De Lesseps: [as Juliet] I do remember well where I should be, and there I am - where is my Romeo?
Nurse: [crying, shouting from the audience] Dead!

Viola de Lesseps: [as Thomas Kent] Tell me how you love her, Will.
William Shakespeare: Like a sickness and its cure together.

Viola De Lesseps: I loved a writer and gave up the prize for a sonnet.
William Shakespeare: I was the more deceived.
Viola De Lesseps: Yes, you were deceived, for I did not know how much I loved you.

Viola De Lesseps: Master Shakespeare?
William Shakespeare: The same, alas.
Viola De Lesseps: Oh, but why "alas"?
William Shakespeare: A lowly player.
Viola De Lesseps: Alas indeed, for I thought you the highest poet of my esteem and writer of plays that capture my heart.
William Shakespeare: Oh - I am him too!

William Shakespeare: Can you love a fool?
Viola De Lesseps: Can you love a player?

William Shakespeare: Follow that boat!
Boatman: Right you are, guv'nor!... I know your face. Are you an actor?
William Shakespeare: Yes.
Boatman: Yes, I've seen you in something. That one about a king.
William Shakespeare: Really?
Boatman: I had that Christopher Marlowe in my boat once.
[Will sighs]

William Shakespeare: I have a new play.
Christopher Marlowe: What's it called?
William Shakespeare: Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter.
Christopher Marlowe: What is the story?
William Shakespeare: Well, there's this pirate... In truth I have not written a word.
Christopher Marlowe: Romeo...Romeo is Italian. Always in and out of love.
William Shakespeare: Yes, that's good. Until he meets...
Christopher Marlowe: Ethel
William Shakespeare: Do you think?
Christopher Marlowe: The daughter of his enemy.
William Shakespeare: The daughter of his enemy...
Christopher Marlowe: His best friend is killed in a duel by Ethel's brother, or something. His name is Mercutio.
William Shakespeare: Mercutio...Good name.
Nol: Will, they're waiting for you!
William Shakespeare: I'm coming...Good luck with yours, Kit.
Christopher Marlowe: I thought your play was for Burbage.
William Shakespeare: This is a different one.
Christopher Marlowe: A different one you haven't written?

[Authorizing Lord Wessex to marry Viola] Have her, then, but you're a lordly fool. She's been plucked since I saw her last - and not by you. It takes a woman to know it.

[expressing displeasure with Juliet's performance] Suffering cats!

[last lines] My story starts at sea... a perilous voyage to an unknown land... a shipwreck... the wild waters roar and heave... the brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned... all save one... a lady... whose soul is greater than the ocean... and her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace... not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story... for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name... Viola.

[on first hearing the tragic ending to Romeo and Juliet] Well, that will have them rolling in the aisles.

[on learning the fate of his character] He dies?

[paying a young John Webster for having tipped him off] You will do well, I fear.

[reacting to another actor during rehearsal] Are you going to do it like that?

[singing the stage directions] Gentlemen upstage; ladies downstage... Are you a lady Mr. Kent?